Biography

Barry Le Va was born in 1941 in Long Beach, California. Among his earliest shows was a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1969. Beginning in the late 1960s, his work has been included in landmark exhibitions such as Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1969, and Information at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970. Le Va has subsequently participated in documenta 5 (1972), 6 (1977), and 7 (1982) in Kassel, Germany; and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions of 1971, 1977, and 1995.

Le Va has had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and in Europe and has been the subject of major survey exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, 1979; the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, 1988, (traveled to: Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, 1989; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1989; Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, 1990); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2005 (curated by Ingrid Schaffner); and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal, 2006.

More recently, Le Va’s works were included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York, 2015-2016; Piece Work, organized by Robert Storr, at Yale University School of Art, New Haven, 2015; and Bold Abstractions: Selections from the DMA Collection 1966–1976, curated by Gavin Delahunty, at the Dallas Museum of Art, 2015.

His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; mumok, Vienna; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. The artist is the subject of a new scholarly book by Michael Maizels entitled Barry Le Va: The Aesthetic Aftermath, published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Le Va currently lives and works in New York City.

Publications

Press

In a juxtaposition worthy of the most penetrating and scholarly curated exhibition, but in fact thrown up by the invisible hand of the market, one can stand in an aisle at the Park Avenue Armory this weekend and see Cheim and Read’s tastefully sparse installation of three stack paintings by Ron Gorchov, an idiom that tests painting’s boundary with sculpture, out of one eye and a Barry Le Va floor piece at David Nolan out of the other. It would be hard to say what boundaries Le Va isn’t testing: a pioneer of what would come be labeled post-minimalism and process art before those terms were in circulation, his random scatterings of fragments of felt, ball bearings and bales of fabric amidst sleek linear elements in mirrored metal were described in the pages of ARTForum by Jane Livingstone as “distributional sculpture,” a term that didn’t quite make it to the canon of art jargon. Le Va’s piece, planned in his studio in 1967, is enjoying its first realization in 2016.

Like many sculptors who emerged in the late sixties, this American artist took his work off the pedestal and onto the floor. In his latest piece, “Network,” bulky cylinders, chevrons, and pi symbols are laid out in an almost, but not quite, symmetrical arrangement. Most of the elements are cast from the industrial material Hydrostone; aluminum rods are placed to suggest unifying connections between them. Is this an installation or a sculpture? Le Va’s achievement is that he makes the question moot, creating a pleasant tension between the whole and its parts.

Everything’s going to pieces in the David Nolan booth at the Art Show—but fret not, that’s the point of Switch, 1967/2016, a giant felt-based “scatter” installation by Barry Le Va, which takes up the whole space. Born in California in 1941, Le Va arrived on the scene in the mid-1960s, as Minimalist sculpture courtesy of Donald Judd was reaching its peak power. Veering in the opposite direction of objecthood, Le Va, using materials like felt, dust, and shattered glass, began making process-based compositions on the floor. Partly sculptural installation, partly deconstructed painting à la Jackson Pollock, partly a performance vacated by the artist, partly the scene of a violent crime (Le Va has adocumented interest in detective novels), not even Artforum had any idea what to call Le Va’s work—a November 1968 cover story dubbed it “distributional sculpture,” for lack of a better term—but today, it’s safe to dub it a watershed moment, with reverberations seen in such contemporary artists as Sarah Sze.

Whether or not they know it, the many young artists today who make haphazard-looking, improvisational installations owe something to Barry Le Va. A pioneer of the diffuse style known, variously, as “Scatter Art” and “Process Art,” Le Va has dispersed materials such as felt, chalk, flour, and shattered glass across large expanses of floor in a way that looks impulsive but is actually somewhat scripted. (His pieces generally begin with written directives and diagrams.) Le Va has long been admired by critics and art historians (he was included in MoMA’s seminal 1970 group show “Information,” and the ICA Philadelphia gave him a retrospective in 2005), but he’s still not nearly as well-known as his contemporaries Donald Judd and Richard Serra. David Nolan’s ADAA booth, which reprises Le Va’s late-1960s “distributions” of felt, aluminum, and steel in a single installation, should help to raise his profile.

In the heyday of postminimalism art, Barry Le Va’s work showed at paradigm shifting exhibitions like the Whitney’s “Anti-Illusion” (1969) and MoMA’s “Information” (1970), alongside Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris. Today, however, the septuagenarian’s legacy has faded somewhat as compared to his bold-faced peers. But Le Va gets his due at David Nolan gallery’s booth, where the artist has restaged one of his floor works, composed of thick, rumpled stacks of felt — some strips cut up and shredded — and dozens of scattered outsized metal balls. It isn’t quite clear whom or what has wreaked the havoc — and that’s just the point. Le Va calls upon the viewer to piece together the unseen action, what he refers to as a Sherlock-Holmes aesthetic. This somewhat distinguishes him from his fellow process artists. As author Mike Maizel writes in an excellent excerpt from the 2015 book “Barry Le Va: The Aesthetic Aftermath,” “Though all of these figures championed an aesthetics of disorder as a means of militating against a cultural or intellectual status quo, Le Va’s consideration of the work of art as always already broken — always already vanished – constitutes a more fundamental intervention against the deep-seated metaphysics of singularity, clarity, logic, and presence.” The day of the Art Show opening, the gallery representative on hand reported that they were still deliberating on the price of the work.

Thought, as I experience it, is generally an unpredictable, often murky process. Sometimes a whole strain of interesting thought may spring on me fully formed and unannounced, one facet leading smoothly into the next, complete and beautiful. If I'm lucky, I have a pencil handy. But those are rare and beneficent days. For the most part, the act of thinking is a muddled disappointing and tedious journey over well-worn ruts and patches of quick sand up to my neck. Writing is most like quick sand because in writing, you must actually organize your thoughts and, beyond a vague notion of electricity in the brain merging with cumulative life experience, I have almost no idea what thought is.

In an opening-day walk-through of the big, densely installed and (in both senses) stunning survey of his work at the ICA in Philadelphia, Barry Le Va offered this insight: “Ultimately it becomes a question of, can you tell the difference between order and disorder?” It’s a very good question. Like most Conceptualist-type puzzles, it suggests others: Is distinguishing order from its opposite a primary problem for Le Va or an ancillary one, tangent to concerns with symbolic content? Or, with respect to his famously sleuth-baiting work, is it altogether a red herring? And, not least, how much importance should we attach to what the artist says?

Barry Le Va's art of the late 1960's so perfectly typified the advanced aesthetic strategies of that turbulent moment that one almost feels he would have to have been invented if he didn't already exist. His sculptures represented a heightened, take-no-prisoners distillation of ideas drifting in the air, which in relative isolation and with almost telepathic clairvoyance he synthesized in an extremely original way. In November 1968, the completely unknown twenty-seven-year-old California artist appeared on the cover of Artforum, with an image of a large stretch of wooden floor, scattered with apparently random strips and little scraps of gray felt. Inside the magazine were pictures of various installations with myriad fragments of cloth, ranging from large bolts to ribbons and tiny cuttings, dispersed across the floor in enormous and otherwise empty rooms. With their emphatically horizontal spatial development, lack of internal armatures, and embrace of empty space as a physical platform, these works were clearly connected to those of approximate peets like Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, and Bill Bollinger, and to European artists, particularly those associated with arte povera, such as Luciano Fabro and Mario Merz.